How much memory?

IMO the practical minimum is 32 MB, which should be plausible but above average for an arbitrarily picked 486...

Pentium 1 100 with 16MB is... "eh", swapping all the time on all but the lightest operations (like explorer+notepad+a VB5 program with maybe 12 variables)

I currently have installed about 20 megabytes of ram. I am also expecting 256k L2 cache to come in the mail

You can play DOS games in DOS mode, so it's fine. Games like Red Alert and Warcraft II Battle.net will work fine too.

DX4 systems continued to ship as the lowest-end budget systems after the release of Windows 95 and had it preinstalled. Looking at the December 1995 PC Magazine, the "name brands" seemed to use DX4-75 and DX4-100 CPUs only on their most entry level laptop and not on desktops at all. White-label systems advertised later in the magazine had them on desktops as well. Also consider that the Am5x86-133 wasn't even released until after Windows 95 and was used on low-end systems for a bit after its release.

Just don't install IE 4 Active Desktop on your system.

I'm currently using Windows 95 RTM in PCem with a Pentium Overdrive/63 for testing purposes.
The CPU power is about enough to get the S-YXG50 MIDI softsynth running, even. At low polyphony, I mean.
So I think that a fast 486 is okay for playing games, depending on your needs. 😀 👍

For comparison, back in the 90s, my father ran Windows 95 RTM smoothly on a 386DX-40 with 16MB RAM.
He used is for business purposes, not games, though. Gupta SQLWindows, Visual Basic (pre-VB5), Turbo Pascal for Windows..
To do online banking aka home banking, to dial into CompuServe and T-Online (pre-Internet online servies), print out bank formulars etc.

Note that the RAM consisted of 32-pin SIMMs. 16MB equaled the full memory expansion of a 386SX.
If he ran a later version of Windows 95 or had a Pentium, he would have had upgraded RAM accordingly.

Personally, I ran Windows 98SE with 24MB of RAM for a while. On a Pentium 75, I recall, with an 1,5GB SCSI drive.
So HDD access was quite quick, including access to the swap file. Also, 98SE had better memory managment.
It could execute properly aligned program code from within the swap file directly.
Nowadays, I would give it 48 or 64MB of RAM. These are safe values, within the usual limits.

For Windows 95, 32MB up are no waste, I think. Just please make sure the cache on the motherboard goes as high/covers that range.
If the motherhoard has little cache installed, access to RAM above a certain point might be slower than the rest.

I’m running windows 95c on a 386-40 with 32 mb of ram right now.

You should be able to run windows 95 pretty well on a wb dx4-100

I also have 95c on my pod83 with 32mb of ram.

I run scsi on those setups. I think it may help with cpu offloading.

I was an engineer working on an August 1995 rollout for Windows 95 at a fortune 500 company. We had beta tested lots of stuff that spring because we wanted to be an exchange early adopter to get rid of MS Mail. The exchange client for Win 3.1 client was so raw that we realized we needed to upgrade the OS on several 1000 computers if we wanted to use Exchange in 1996. Our upgrade policy was that as long as you had a 486, 200MB hard drive, and 16MB of ram, you were allowed to request Win95 on your existing hardware. The upgrade process involved formatting the drive from a network boot floppy, copying the C:\ files from the golden image on network that had all the software & drivers baked in, but the the ENUM branch of the HKLM was removed so it would auto detect hardware on the first boot. It was much faster than a scripted install.

In my opinion, Windows 95 RTM was usable for office purposes on a 386 if you had 16MB and an accelerated video card, but the problem was that most of the 386 computers only had slow frame buffer VGA , < 120MB hard drives , limited ram expansion, and sometimes microchannel. Not to mention we encountered the occasional A1 or A2 stepping 386 chip during beta testing that would fail to boot W95 after we wiped the drive. So we just didn't bother with the 386's. Made more sense to just have them spend $2K for a new 90Mhz Pentium system with built in PCI graphics and a 400 MB drive than it was to invest days trying to pimp out an old jalopy.

But if they had a 486? Usually they just needed a$400 16MB simm and they were ready to go. 32MB ram wasn't realistic at that time. The 486 HP Vectra's had VLB VGA accelerators so they were good. The early Compaq 486's sometimes had VGA with limited acceleration features. An ATI mach32 ISA or the like would have probably been the ticket, but instead they usually purchased DX4-100 overdrive CPU's. Those were write through cache . It was brute force, but they did noticeable improve performance after a fashion in non-text scrolling situations.

douglar wrote on 2023-02-25, 04:32:

I was an engineer working on an August 1995 rollout for Windows 95 at a fortune 500 company. We had beta tested lots of stuff that spring because we wanted to be an exchange early adopter to get rid of MS Mail. The exchange client for Win 3.1 client was so raw that we realized we needed to upgrade the OS on several 1000 computers if we wanted to use Exchange in 1996. Our upgrade policy was that as long as you had a 486, 200MB hard drive, and 16MB of ram, you were allowed to request Win95 on your existing hardware. The upgrade process involved formatting the drive from a network boot floppy, copying the C:\ files from the golden image on network that had all the software & drivers baked in, but the the ENUM branch of the HKLM was removed so it would auto detect hardware on the first boot. It was much faster than a scripted install.

Nice. Around the same time I was a 7-year-old and we had just got a new family PC (486dx2-66 with 4MB of RAM). It was one of those deals where it shipped past the Win95 release date with WfW 3.11 but came with a coupon to order an upgrade kit. So I still have somewhat of an oddity: a Windows 95 CD that is the OEM design and takes an OEM key, but is the upgrade edition.

Needless to say, despite MS requirements Win95 was unusable with 4MB of RAM, so the upgrade got reverted back to WfW 3.11 shortly after trying it.

It's interesting that back then MS endorsed totally unrealistic system requirements (cacheless 386DX-25 with 4MB of RAM would have passed) and now with 11 it's the other way around with artificial requirements when virtually any corporate machine would run it fine.

There's an interesting writeup on The Old New Thing blog about the early 386 chips and an attempt to modify their compilers to work around bugs in them, where they gave up on support for those chips before the release but the special code generation rules were left in.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-02-25, 04:49:

Needless to say, despite MS requirements Win95 was unusable with 4MB of RAM, so the upgrade got reverted back to WfW 3.11 shortly after trying it.

It's interesting that back then MS endorsed totally unrealistic system requirements (cacheless 386DX-25 with 4MB of RAM would have passed) and now with 11 it's the other way around with artificial requirements when virtually any corporate machine would run it fine.

Outside of a couple operations like installing and hardware detection, win95 RTM, like OS/2 2.0 was only occasionally CPU bound. It did have a memory floor like you describe. You really wanted 8MB to boot and 16MB if you wanted to multitask two apps. But the OS didn’t put the hurt on the CPU very often.

I knew a training company that had classrooms full of no name DX4 -100 clones with trident 9400 graphics. Probably had WB cache. They asked me if they needed to buy Pentiums to do Win95 training. I told them they just needed to go to 16MB RAM. I think they got another 2 years out of those boxes after adding an 8MB simm to each.

Win98 was heavier. You can get by with a DX4 100, but you need 16MB to boot, but 32MB to be comfortable. A good accelerated video card on a fast bus is really helpful but more importantly get DMA mode working on your storage. That was almost a must on a slower CPU or that background IO is going to really degrade your experience. Win98 really stsrted to push the 486’s out the door.

I used 95 on various cpus from 100mhz to 233mhz, cyrix, amd and intel, back in the 90s and honestly its terrible. The 233mmx with EDO really wasn't bad at all though at this speed windows felt proper and not laggy. As long as its with the 95 shell, the moment anyone installs the IE4 shell like the one with 98 it kills the performance. But if you don't mind watching hour glasses and going to go make a sandwhich while shit loads and coming back than it works I guess.

This takes me back ...

My first PC own PC was a P60 with 16MB RAM, which performed very comparably to a 486DX4. I considered Win95 on release, but after suffering with it on 486DX4 systems at uni, decided to stick with DOS 6.22 and Win3.1 on my hardware.

Yes, a 486DX4 with sufficient RAM runs Win95 fine, but once you fire up software running under Windows you notice how limited you are. I'd go as far as to say no Windows 95- native games that are performance sensitive will run adequately on hardware that is older than the platform itself. I've always preferred to run older software for which my hardware is over - specced rather than struggling with newer software that is screaming for better hardware.

Could do worse though. Somebody at uni IT thought it would be a sensible idea to upgrade the old computer labs with 486DX33 and 4MB RAM to Win95 too. I hope there is a very special circle in hell prepared for that person...

In my teenage circles we avoided Windows 95 like a plague due to doubling memory requirements without any clear benefits. Real 3D accelerators didnt how up until 1997 anyway (glquake), and most games were still pure dos DOS or dual DOS/Win releases. Definitive switch happened in 1998 with win98 and a flood of good Win only games (unreal, fallout2, thief, starcraft), at that point both ram and fast cpus (celeron) were cheap enough not to bother with DOS.

I love the replies here.

I could certainly see Win98 feeling slow on any computer < 300mhz if you didn’t have DMA enabled on your storage or didn’t have good 2d acceleration working on your video card. But speed is relative. I ran OS/2 2.0 on a 20mhz 386sx w/ 4MB ram and a Trident VGA for a couple months before I could afford more RAM and accelerated video, so that might have skewed my “Usability” expectations going forward. 20 minute boot times? Just work that into your schedule! (No, it was terrible)

The advantages of Win95 over Win31 were more noticeable in the corporate world than they were at home. Win95 didn’t require a highly experienced tech to sit there and fit drivers & tsr’s into upper memory blocks or hours spent identifying hardware and configuring DOS plug play drivers for a PCMCIA modems because at home you only had one PC and you knew all the parts and it wasn’t a laptop. Win95 also didn’t get the dreaded “out of memory” or “out of resources” error messages as often because at home, most people only had shrink wrapped software and didn’t have to deal with buggy in-house apps on a real mode networking driver stack that didn’t always play nice. Win95 had easy protected mode networking that didn't require much thought and was good enough at reigning in the bad apps while still allowing real mode stuff in the edge cases. We upgraded about 2000 seats in a year with a team of 6 with about 1/2 of the installs were on existing hardware. We sent the Win95 image out to the PC vendor so all new PC's arrived ready to go. But it was a manufacturing company, so in many ways they didn't run as much demanding software compared to some other industries.

The NT 3.51 roll out that I worked on at a major financial company in '97 was much more challenging than the win95 roll put and took a lot more staff. We had about 100 people to do 4000 upgrades, all of which were new hardware. There were a lot more custom apps, many required ODBC drivers, and they wanted NTFS on everything for security, which made boot disks more challenging. They skipped Win95 and jumped straight to WinNT 3.51 and it was a painful jump. We were also using scripted install process instead of just jamming a FAT based image onto a blank drive that already had the apps installed. We user using a home made database driven software installation service to install the apps and trying to use roaming profiles. All sorts of pain. The baseline build there was a P166 and 96MB ram for NT 3.51, but high end users got Dual P-Pro's with 512MB.

douglar wrote on 2023-02-25, 14:23:

The advantages of Win95 over Win31 were more noticeable in the corporate world than they were at home. Win95 didn’t require a highly experienced tech to sit there and fit drivers & tsr’s into upper memory blocks or hours spent identifying hardware and configuring DOS plug play drivers for a PCMCIA modems because at home you only had one PC and you knew all the parts and it wasn’t a laptop. Win95 also didn’t get the dreaded “out of memory” or “out of resources” error messages as often because at home, most people only had shrink wrapped software and didn’t have to deal with buggy in-house apps on a real mode networking driver stack that didn’t always play nice. Win95 had easy protected mode networking that didn't require much thought and was good enough at reigning in the bad apps while still allowing real mode stuff in the edge cases. We upgraded about 2000 seats in a year with a team of 6 with about 1/2 of the installs were on existing hardware. We sent the Win95 image out to the PC vendor so all new PC's arrived ready to go. But it was a manufacturing company, so in many ways they didn't run as much demanding software compared to some other industries.

Interesting that you don't mention the UI. It was so much more intuitive than anything that came before it, finally gaining parity with Mac (and IMO even better because the right-click menus were a big enhancement). And I'd argue far more intuitive than what we've got now...

Hm. Since my father was essentially a hard-/software developer at the time,
I'm afraid I can't speak much about the private user experience.
However, as far as my father's software was concerned, a lot of the commercial software was still 16-Bit by default.
So I dare to say that Windows 3.1 in pure 16-Bit mode (Standard-Mode so to say) was stable, at least.

For 32-Bit computing, it may have been Windows 95 or a similar OS, two.
In the early years, Windows 95 continued to be a host for a lot popular 16-Bit Windows applications.
Gupta SQLWindows was among the first Windows applications which really wanted to see 32-Bit power (even on 3.1), I guess.

It was the Windows 98 era which made the final switch to 32-Bit, I think.
That was the time when 32-Bit applications dominated the computing scene (VB5/6, Delphi 3/4/5, Visual C++ 5/6 etc),
while 16-Bot applications more or less lived a shadow existence.

Edit: The Windows 3.1 GUI shared similarities with Motif or CDE on Unix..

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-02-25, 09:50:

In my teenage circles we avoided Windows 95 like a plague due to doubling memory requirements without any clear benefits. Real 3D accelerators didnt how up until 1997 anyway (glquake), and most games were still pure dos DOS or dual DOS/Win releases. Definitive switch happened in 1998 with win98 and a flood of good Win only games (unreal, fallout2, thief, starcraft), at that point both ram and fast cpus (celeron) were cheap enough not to bother with DOS.

A few years younger but similar with XP vs. 2000/98SE. On < 512MB RAM systems XP didn't do anything a 2000/98SE couldn't and was slower/swapped to disk constantly.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-02-25, 21:09:

rasz_pl wrote on 2023-02-25, 09:50:

In my teenage circles we avoided Windows 95 like a plague due to doubling memory requirements without any clear benefits. Real 3D accelerators didnt how up until 1997 anyway (glquake), and most games were still pure dos DOS or dual DOS/Win releases. Definitive switch happened in 1998 with win98 and a flood of good Win only games (unreal, fallout2, thief, starcraft), at that point both ram and fast cpus (celeron) were cheap enough not to bother with DOS.

A few years younger but similar with XP vs. 2000/98SE. On < 512MB RAM systems XP didn't do anything a 2000/98SE couldn't and was slower/swapped to disk constantly.

I'm speaking under correction, but our Pentium 3 at home was upgraded to 768 MB of RAM after we upgraded from 98SE to XP.
That was okay, considering that we kept using the Windows 98 era software.

jakethompson1 wrote on 2023-02-25, 21:07:

Interesting that you don't mention the UI. It was so much more intuitive than anything that came before it, finally gaining parity with Mac (and IMO even better because the right-click menus were a big enhancement). And I'd argue far more intuitive than what we've got now...

I had been using OS/2 Workplace Shell at a previous job and dual booting OS/2 at home for years before switching to Win95, so I was used to a full featured interface. While I liked OS/2, I was willing to go to the slightly dumbed down Win95 interface because of the better hardware support, better DOS support and I got away from that labyrinthian networking and config.sys setup that was the stuff of nightmares.

However for most corporate end users, the "here's the 5-10 apps you need to do your job" system that Win31 or WinNT 3.51 provided worked well . Didn't take much explaining, while Win95 often took some time to adjust.

But for my personal use, you are correct. Win95 had a decent interface for my personal use compared to the stuff that had come before while retaining a consistent vision & simplicity that's been lacking for a while.

p.s. We did follow up that WinNT 3.51 upgrade with an NT4 upgrade the following year. That was an place upgrade, redoing the same machines we rolled out the previous year, but I was still happy to work it on because that WinNT 3.51 was definitely a step back after working on Win95 & OS/2.

Windows 95.. There's something about Windows 95 that shouldn't be forgotten.
It gave life to all sorts of computer jokes.

Here's one I just found (rather harmless).

Features of Windows 95:
Multitasking - Now you can crash multiple applications at the same time.

Multimedia - Now there are crashes with much more sound and graphics.

Microsoft Network - Talk to other people about your Windows95 - Crashes.

Compatible - Windows 95 can also crash your old Windows 3.1 applications.

😉

Edit: One more. Windows 95: The first operating system that has its expiry date in its name!
God, I love humor. 😂